


En Bloc

by SmokedSalmon



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Boys smacking each other around, Bump 'n' grind, College poverty, Connie and Sasha, Eren the clueless narrator, Everyone keeps bleeding, Horse girl Jean, Illustrations, Leather Jackets, Levi and Eren just talk the entire time that's it done the story end, Levi wears white boots, M/M, Modern AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-04 11:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmokedSalmon/pseuds/SmokedSalmon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one wants to talk about the fight clubs in St. Maria. Not even Eren knew about the pseudo-gangs until his anger split off at the wrong time in the wrong place with the wrong person. But from that moment on--which he really can’t seem to recall--he finds himself interlocked in a world of poorly judged underground fist-throwing, red leather jackets and the mystery of an impossibly strong gang known as the Titans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Acts of Reparation

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Zipra on Tumblr for agreeing to do the art throughout this project and being my main SNK consultant.

  
  


It started with my knuckles colliding with the back of a stranger’s head.

“Who do you think you fucking _are_?"

The world drained into the cracks of a convenience store parking lot and resurfaced as pulsations of vermilion. Blood spattered alongside every word that ripped from my throat and I said something but _what_? Not _something_ but hundreds of things all at once and they combusted into afterthoughts like the ghosts of my rage.

Our surroundings fell into a haze of bones crunching against one another. Friction sparked and spritzes of saliva and plasma sprayed onto the stranger’s face when his fist swung toward my nose and landed. A crackling pop sang with my scream, and I clenched a fist of nailless fingertips only to be thrown to the ground with an oxygen halting smack. Breaths stuttered in my parched lungs while he ground me into ice until skin tore from my features. I started screaming while one of my back teeth dislodged, and I found myself spitting blood to keep from suffocating.

“Eren, _move_!” 

_Stand up. Stand up. Fucking stand up._

But I didn’t stand up. Every ounce of my calcium and skin were dragged through the graveyard of oil and cigarette butts that seeped into my clothes and stained. Coppery red bubbled between my teeth like trenches of gore, and when the kicking boot rammed into my throat, all I thought was-- _kill him_. My ribs shattered into shards and scattered along the damp asphalt like venetian glass. All at once I couldn’t breathe, but the same desperate thoughts kept cycling through my head. I was going to kill him. _I’m going to fucking kill him._

It was then I saw the red flickering, and without rhyme or reason, the world shoved me head first into a tub of darkness. Armin’s screaming penetrated the sudden silence like an intrusive thought and my nerves rolled clean off my body until I was wholly unfeeling. Figurative cardiac arrest stopped time itself and consciousness closed like a bud for what felt like an eternity. Only when Armin’s screaming stopped did I open back up on a completely different end of the parking lot with aching wrists and bleeding fingers.

“Don’t move!” Armin was dialing 911.

Suddenly everything was raw and exposed to the elements, but I didn’t want to go in an ambulance. “Don’t--”

“It’s not for _you_.”

He made his frantic call and then yanked me up by my arms, panting and wiping up his snot. It wasn’t until I was seated upright did I notice the two guys on the ground across the lot who looked dead. I stared at the bodies while attempting to breathe right. After a couple tries, the rib damage didn’t seem half as bad as anticipated, and my legs were virtually unharmed. Armin only momentarily struggled pulling me to my feet before hurriedly shoving me into the back of his van. The guy who’d started it was nowhere to be found.

“Let’s go home,” I wheezed.

“Are you _stupid_?”

Human beings have a weird sense of entitlement down to the simplest things. Granted, at the end of the day, they have a right to nature’s implied necessities. You know what I’m talking about. Human’s basic needs such as safety, self-actualization, a sense of belonging, physiology and esteem. I’m pretty sure this is called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but my psychology scores weren’t all that Crunchwrap Supreme, and it was Armin’s diligent note taking and Mikasa’s moral support that pushed me through that final and away from post-secondary alcoholism. The point is, these are rights we possess as people, but there’s something about the emphasis we put on _esteem_ that hinders my day-to-day interaction with the majority. In short, I have a knee jerk reaction to people who hyperfocus on the respect they _think_ they deserve in contrast to what they’ve earned. It sounds noble at first glance, but it’s done me more bad than good. Like break my face.

“You should be proud,” Armin told me thirty minutes later while he scrunched my bloody paper towels compliments of 7-Eleven. After the longest five minute drive of my life, we were sitting in the emergency room. I couldn't stop gasping, the bridge of my nose was swollen to where I could see it without crossing my eyes, and my shirt was a biohazard. “The town over felt it when your nose fissured down the middle. It stopped Christmas carolers in their tracks.”

“It was a cheap shot.” Until then I’d never been aware of how connected the skin between my mouth and nose are. “You saw it was a cheap shot.”

“Yeah…” He trailed off with a smile and stared out the wide window behind me. Ice pellets were barreling down from the hazy night sky with no backdrop stars. Bad weather had been the prevailing theme that month and even the blood that’d shot from my nose had blended into the parking lot’s black ice. “Something like that.”

“There was insinuation in that.”

Armin wasn’t looking at me but his brow quirked and smile broadened. “There was?”

The waiting room was empty, but that was because the local hospital was a butcher shop that didn’t have the budget to bring it out of the 1970s. Armin sat across from me awkwardly slumped over in his egg-shaped chair inspired by Regan MacNeil’s vomit. He didn’t want to be there even if it’d been his idea. When we were kids he’d told me hospitals were human offering plates, but from where I sat it looked like Dr. Seuss received a rejection letter and did something about it. Even the stack of magazines tossed on the table to my right were aged to the point of nostalgia. The last time I’d seen someone wear a block colored jogging suit I’d been eight years old singing _Lightning Crashes_ with my mom in her purple Chevrolet Tracker.

“We could’ve walked away,” Armin said without an ounce of heart. He knew better. “That guy was old. He stood like a trained fighter.”

“If that’s true, then he’s the loser for picking fights with people who aren’t half as skilled.”

My nose unexpectedly dripped blood onto the Pepto-Bismol tile, and I exhaled before reaching out to catch it in cupped palms as if preparing to drink from a spout. Armin handed back my paper towels, stood up with a shift of his chair and went to remind a nurse I was the hottest mess they’d seen in the past hour. The janitor returned before Armin with a dirty mop, but when Armin _did_ pop his head into the empty waiting room he waved at me. Standing behind him was a disgruntled nurse, and she was wearing a stare capable of raising the hospital’s body count.

“You look good,” Armin lied once I joined them with weak steps. “I think you’ll be okay.”

“Even with every vessel in my eye busted?”

He paused and glanced at me while I side eyed him with bloody scleras. “... _yes_.”

“You’re not trying very hard right now, are you?”

Not that I blamed him for being dry. He’d spent a ten minute stretch screaming at me while someone rammed their boot into my ribcage only to climb onto the person’s back and end up elbowed in the face. Every time I looked at him his bruised cheek darkened, but it was the extent of his injuries. I think he was more or less annoyed about being cold. We were both soaked from falling into the December slush and smelled like motor oil frosted with decomposing shame. That was the worst part. The humiliation, I mean. It wasn’t like we could run from it by avoiding one another until our faces healed.

“The doctor’s tired of seeing cases like yours,” Nurse Anvil Chorus said as she opened an empty examination room. “Don’t expect a lot of patience from him.”

She was right, but it didn’t matter because we weren’t there long enough to warrant the beating I got. One look at my scraped nose and the doctor didn’t care. I thought it was concave and a testament to all the shit I’d taken for my friend. He impatiently drummed his fingers along his thigh and he told me my nose was probably broken but didn’t need to be reset. They begrudgingly did X-rays, confirmed his aggravated theory and the rest is history currently documented on a medical chart somewhere in Sancta Maria Hospital.

“Are you hungry?” Armin asked while a nurse handed me paperwork. They were obviously pushing us out the front door. All I could assume was we were breathing too much of their air. “I think I’m hungry.”

“I don’t think I can open my mouth wide enough to eat.”

He dug out his car keys as if I hadn’t said a word. “ _I’m_ definitely hungry.”

When someone breaks their nose bruising develops along the inner-eyes. It spreads onto cheekbones in yellow and maroon rings and can take weeks to fade. I knew this and yet I didn’t think twice about it while popping extra strength Tylenol in the hospital and shrugging at a relieved Armin. I didn’t think about it when Armin drove his mauve mom van through a busy drive through nor did I think about it when we cautiously putzed onto the icy parking lot of our dingy apartment complex. Maybe I was tired or maybe it was a subconscious defense mechanism, but it hadn’t registered I’d look like a package of ground hamburger on my final landmark birthday. This wasn’t only to the benefit of myself but the entire night considering it’d been bad enough.

“He was twice your size,” Armin reminded me while he shifted the car into park. “I never know what you’re thinking when you do that.”

That made two of us. Even after the van was unsteadily parked and the ignition killed we didn’t move from our seats. I pressed my lips together and exhaled as if that could be an explanation. How _had_ that fight started? Why couldn’t I remember? It was weird to be able to identify that I was compensating for something but incapable of pinpointing the source of said compensation. Armin was observant, which meant he more than likely had the answer I was looking for. He wouldn’t let me off that easy, though. The guy was so inherently good he refused to give me a leg up if he thought there was chance I’d have an epiphany that’d help me along the way. These were all assumptions, but at the same time, I could’ve put my life on them.

When I leaned back he continued. “Someone’s going to kill you.”

I didn’t mean to incredulously laugh. It just happened. “Where did _that_ come from?”

“That last guy didn’t hold back.” He turned toward me in his seat. “From the way it looked he was trying to kill you. How are you even standing right now?”

“It wasn’t that bad,” I murmured while rubbing at my sore cheekbones.

“When do I ever jump into your fights?”

Armin wasn’t much of a fighter nor was he the diehard loving type. The reality was I’d challenged someone in front of a convenience store because he’d been voicing an opinion that went against my personal philosophies and integrity of my best friend. Armin jumping in really did say something.

Suddenly the temperature in the van dropped and I let myself out. “Come on. I’m freezing and you have the key.”

Once we were at the door, Armin took his sweet time turning the key in the deadbolt. It was like watching a clock, and I began preparing to shove him out of the way to do it myself. The door shimmied open with an icy crackle and we exchanged glances in the semi-darkness because it was _that_ cold. Inside was the atypical apartment dressed in Goodwill furniture steamed for bedbugs and pieces we’d picked up along the way. Nothing was cohesive down to the collection of coffee mugs hanging on small hooks above a knock-off Keurig. Armin called it avant-garde. I called it student poverty and generous donations technically meant for the elderly.

“I’m turning the heat up and going to bed.” I shifted out of my jacket. “I’d rather lose a couple pounds next month than freeze to death this month.”

An industrial warehouse apartment only sounds cool. After the first snowstorm and gas bill both Armin and I were disenchanted, financially destitute and suddenly that much more aware of the reason our rent was cheap. It was an expensive lesson to learn and there was nothing we could do about it except pile on the blankets and completely dry our hair before leaving the bathroom. Sometimes we left the oven on and open, but this only started after the midnight conclusion burning to death was less likely in a place made of steel and stone than dying from hypothermia.

I went to bed that night throbbing and woke up cracked in half with my organs spread on the bed like an egg yolk. That’s probably one of the worst things about the human body aside from what it excretes. You think you hurt at first and then you sleep for a night and wake up _knowing_ you hurt, and there’s nothing you can do about bruising except wait it out. It didn’t help I’d spent more than half the night tossing and turning and slamming my nose against the mattress, which was exactly what I _wasn’t_ supposed to do. I hadn’t slept beyond a couple hours, and when the sun came up and I heard Armin’s bedroom door open, I forced myself out of bed. My bed being a mattress on the floor layered in stale blankets, regret and drool.

Armin greeted me in the hallway with exactly what I needed. “Wow--you look _horrible_.”

I walked toward the bathroom tugging the drawstring of my pajama pants free from my boxers. “Because you expected me to look like Audrey Hepburn this morning.”

“I’m not kidding. It’s probably the worst I’ve seen your face. Maybe you should go back to the hospital.” He wasn’t cutting me any slack and followed after me with his jaw looking dislocated. “Prepare yourself. It’s that bad.”

“ _Okay_ , Armin.” I flipped the bathroom light switch with a quick crack of my back and stepped in front of the sink only to stop in mid-grab for my toothbrush. I’d glanced into the mirror. “What the hell _happened_?”

Here’s where I remembered broken noses finger paint faces. My skin was having a cosmic implosion during what looked to be a water retention meltdown. I’d found the Milky Way along my pores.

“It looks like your face is about to melt off.” Armin was helping. “You know how plastic melts? Kind of like that but worse.”

“ _Armin_ , not right now.”

“That’s going to take a while to heal.”

“Are we even friends anymore?”

He grimaced and left me to assess the damage on my own. At first I was pissed because it was something minor on top of already feeling bad, but then it hit me. As if my reflection had summoned will of its own and thrown a brick at my already broken nose I realized I was supposed to be going out for my birthday that weekend. People were going to see me and know I’d gotten my ass handed to me _again_. The sound of Jean’s voice breached my churning thought process and I couldn’t handle the mental image of his smugness. I could always postpone going out until the next weekend and claim I slipped on ice. By then, my eyes would maybe be healed and then it wouldn’t be blatantly obvious I’d done _it_ again. If only Mikasa hadn’t pulled teeth to get off work for that specific weekend. There was no way I could entirely cancel on her. She’d kill the closest person to her when she found out and then go after me. Possibly Armin, too. That was too much senseless death.

“I don’t think I want to go bar hopping for my birthday,” I announced through foam as I brushed my teeth and walked toward the kitchen. “Maybe we should stay in and drink.”

Armin was leaned over the kitchen counter watching the wannabe Keurig drip. “Are you serious? Or are you just saying that because you look bad.”

“I’m not _that_ transparent.”

“Anyway, Mikasa wouldn’t let you stay in on your birthday.”

He was right. “You’re wrong.”

That night was how, five days later, I ended up in an IHOP at three in the morning on my twenty-first birthday. One because the town of St. Maria is degenerate and doesn’t have a Denny’s and two because no one was going to be in IHOP at three in the morning. My bruising hadn’t faded half as much as I’d hoped it would, but Armin vouched for me and promised Mikasa I’d slipped on ice on our way into the laundry mat. We hadn’t told her about my hospital visit because it was a minor incident neither of us had given a second thought to. By the time she saw us Armin’s bruising was gone, which was nice because that was one less lie we had to tell her.

She hardly said a word about it until we were seated in the restaurant. “You need to be more careful, Eren.”

Mikasa sat in the booth next to me. She was staring down at her cup of creamless coffee with her bomber jacket squished between herself and the wall. Her dark hair was tied back and demure posture veiled in form fitting black. Ever since we’d been kids she’d always presented herself as triple her actual age. Currently, she was a lithe sixty year old artist living alone with empty milk bottles in her kitchen’s windowsill and hanging plants in the living room. Mikasa wasn’t actually an artist nor did she decorate her apartment that way, but she gave off the vibe. Calm, thoughtful and on an entirely different plain than the rest of our friends and me.

I had a feeling she didn’t believe Armin, but I kept adding cream to my coffee as if it was a non-issue. “I’m an idiot.”

Armin was stacking every creamer cup I used. “He is.”

“By the way, Armin and I haven’t been friends for a week.”

She vaguely smiled at the two of us and arched an eyebrow. “That's the animosity I smell?”

“No,” I knocked Armin’s stack over, “just Armin.”

We were the one of three groups in the entire restaurant, and there were maybe two waitresses flitting around and pouring coffee. Outside another snow storm was passing through our city, and it was why Mikasa purposely asked for a booth away from the windows. A draft would’ve been on her the entire time and her seating preference was always the security of the interior of the booth. I was so used to her I hardly over thought our dining out habits.

The front doors opened with a sudden jingling and a gust of icy wind that could’ve cooled every cup of coffee in the establishment blew against us. It was soon followed by someone half-screaming.

“Another loss cured only by self-deprecating carbohydrates!”

A female voice piped up. “Could you quiet down? There are people here.”

“And there were people there who watched each of us get knocked onto our asses by one of those _kids_!”

“We should’ve left you in the car.”

The stream of friendly arguing disturbed the murmuring I’d grown accustomed to while waiting for my French toast. I glanced toward the hostess’ stand and was locked in by a horde of red. Five people stood in the front of the restaurant sporting biker jackets the color of blind rage, and they'd been studded and patched beyond the point of uniformity. Each person owned a pair of boots meant for crushing skulls and their stances radiated the kind of unfaltering confidence that could’ve been called militaristic. The idea of talking to one of them was followed by an 80s montage of me having my face rubbed against a sidewalk and dragged naked across a stretch of highway.   

Armin noticed me staring and glanced over his shoulder. “They’re scary.”

“I’ve never seen them before.” I sipped my coffee. It was cold.

The group was guided to a spot three tables down from us and each of their steps exuded the kind of regality one could only find from someone who knew himself. An entire group of that was intimidating, but they didn’t pay attention to the people gawking at them from every direction. Instead, they sat down at their round table and buried their bruised faces into tall menus. Not a single one of them didn’t have hands wrapped in tattered, black bandages, but there was an evident divide among them about waffle toppings and flavored syrup. A redheaded girl, the only girl, caught me staring and proceeded to smile at me and wave. I looked away.

“They have to be on steroids,” said one of them. He had slicked back black hair and previously grumbled about omelets. “There’s no other explanation for that kind of aggression.”

The girl reached over for sugar as a waitress poured her coffee and she sighed through her words. “ _If_ they are, then there’s nothing we can do about it except keep losing until they're taken out.”

Who she'd been talking to when she walked in spoke up again. “Keep saying things like that and I’m going to get a rash.”

His voice was suddenly familiar. I watched Armin’s hand twitch because he’d recognized it too. We exchanged glances, and I was having a hard time believing what I was thinking. My eyes bore into Armin and I made an unattractive face he returned with a sharp drumming along the edge of the table. It was meant to be a kind of Morse code for ‘don’t move, Eren,’ but I read it as, ‘take a leak on his face, Eren.’ I continued sipping my cold coffee for a couple minutes and Mikasa was uninterested in all of it. She’d asked Armin how he’d done last semester, which distracted him, but I was focused on the group with a shitty taste in my mouth. I couldn’t spit it out. The coffee wasn’t helping either.

I finally said something. I had to. “That’s the guy who broke my nose.”

It was exactly how I wanted to spend my already wrecked birthday plans. Eating my eggs while gazing at someone who’d brutalized me after being a prick in the name of his ego. Mikasa stopped talking entirely and stared at me with a look I didn’t have to see to know. It was somewhere between severe accusation and disbelief that shouldn’t have been disbelief in the first place considering my track record.

“Don’t move,” Armin murmured. “ _Eren_ …”

Mikasa’s hand had already found my shoulder, but I shrugged her off. “I don’t need a leash.”

“We should leave,” she suggested. “Someone’s going to cause a scene if we stay too long.”

Someone being _me_. _She_ was the transparent one.

The guy spoke again and this time I was able to pinpoint the body his voice belonged to. He was the one with the silvery undercut and pompous laugh. How I hadn’t recognized his voice immediately didn’t make sense to me considering I’d been preoccupied with it all week. My mind had warped it into its own monster, but now it was clear as day. I touched my nose and thought back on every kick I’d been served during last week’s beating. Suddenly, I was significantly warmer. My blood was curdling.

“We were here first.”

He set down his menu, and I made eye contact with him. For a minute he was confused and jabbed the girl in her bicep as if to point me out to her, but then he paused in realization and rolled his jaw into a lopsided smile. He closed his menu and turned to the girl again, evidently explaining why I was giving him the stare down. I could see she wasn’t finding it funny either with her short stare of disgust that eventually turned into surprise. Everyone at the table stopped talking and looked at me except a single member. His undercut was longer, black and expression on the verge of boredom. He was still reading the menu and only moved to bring his mug to his lips.

“Don’t let him antagonize you,” Armin pleaded, his hand reaching out in a calming gesture. “There’s _five_ of them. Think about what could happen.”

The guy suddenly laughed at me, and that was when I slid out of the booth and stood up fast enough to break my neck. Without needing another warning, the guy kicked back his chair and stood in a single fluid motion.

“Auruo!” The redhead planted her hands on the table. “Don’t be a show off!”

“ _Ay_ , Petra!” He waved her off and began striding toward me. “Don’t be a buzzkill.”

What started as a conversational confrontation morphed into my bandaged fingertips aching at the thought of punching his nose clean off his face. That same sensation from before spiked my blood pressure and ringing in my ears began to infiltrate conscious thought. Self-defense wasn't the issue this time, and I was going to peel the skin off his cheekbones and feed them to him on saltines. It was rush of brain cells twinkling through fury I couldn't grind my teeth past. I was spitting a paste of enamel at his face and on the verge splitting my own throat open in an attempt to retain screaming. The interior of my mouth was blistering, and the memory of blood seeping into the crevices of my teeth enveloped me in a wind tunnel of thoughtlessness.

“What the hell's your problem?” Auruo, or at least that's what the girl called him, caught my fist and whipped it behind my back before shoving my head down. “Same thing as before?”

Each jerk of my arm provided me with a muscle spasm. It was a basic move to disengage someone, and I'd punched right into it without thinking twice. I glanced up toward my booth and Mikasa was on her feet, but Armin was pressing himself against the wall of the booth probably fingering a rosary and asking God to strike me down painlessly before Auruo did me in.

“Suck shit,” was all I could come up with.

A waitress stopped in the middle of the hall behind Mikasa and seemed unsure about what she was supposed to do. Upon spotting her, Auruo tightened his grip on my arm. “It's okay, miss! We were just taking him out back! No need to call the police!”

“Like hell I'm going out back!”

That's when another chair moved. Trapped in the spot Auruo had pinned me down in, I struggled to turn my head and see who was approaching, but all that accomplished was a burning sensation ripping down my neck and spine. I gagged on my own spit for no reason other than I was stupid, and Auruo didn't say anything to elude to whose boots were headed our way. Suddenly, another hand smacked over Auruo's and pushed down to secure me. Auruo's rough hand tugged free creating a momentary gap in which I could've pulled free. I didn't think quick enough, though. The exchange had been too swift.

My new keeper proceeded to rub my face against the glass tabletop and the sight of a happy pancake place mate staring at me was all I could process. That was when the foreign polished voice gave me an order. “We're going outside.”

With a hard yank I was walked out the heavy backdoor and Mikasa called after us, enraged. I didn't catch what she said as his friends pushed back their chairs and followed us outside into the drifting snow. Without warning, I was grabbed up by my hair and shoved against the beige siding of an iced IHOP. My freshly healing nose dug into the hard surface and my eyes watered to the point of dripping. All I could do was jerk back and puff out clouds of wispy breath in between every scream I attempted to grit through.

“Let him go! He's an idiot!” Armin finally ran outside with us, but no one was listening to him.

When I was tossed to the ground the first thing I saw was a pristine white boot swing for the side of my head, but I rolled just in time to take it between the shoulders. Whether or not that was a smart move is later discernible, but I scrambled to my knees only to be roundhouse kicked back down. The way I landed caused my already loose tooth to rip more and it was dangling in the back of my mouth when I heaved my body onto its back in order to see who my assailant was. He was the same guy who hadn't said much of anything before. He was half my size, but every move he made was so precise I was distracted by his fluidity to the point of it being potentially fatal. I was prepared to let him kick the life out of me just to watch.

His foot stopped, though. Instead, it gently settled on top of my head and I caught his stare. It flash froze my bone marrow. He began pressing down when we made eye contact, and for once, I was afraid. My senses were puddling into my typically blocked off head, and as he rubbed his heel into my forehead as if snuffing out a thrown down cigarette butt, I gasped for air.

“There's a time and place.” His voice dripped onto my face and I blinked against it with a flinch. “What's your name?”

I suddenly realized I wasn't breathing well. “Eren Jaeger.”

He lifted his boot and turned toward Armin and Mikasa who were on standby. “Take your friend to the hospital. His ribs are crushed.”

I attempted to sit up on my own and something along my left side shifted. I bit back a pitched yell and realized I could hardly breathe. “No way. We're not done.”

Auruo looked to the girl he'd called Petra. “This is what he did when I met him. He's suicidal.”

Petra stared at him disenchanted with a hand lazily settled on her hip. “And then you ran away.”

“You're _wrong_. I told you what happened.”

I was attempting to sit up when the guy pushed my head back down, still using his shoe. “Your belligerency will kill you.”

That was the last thing I heard him say before he kicked in the side of my head and knocked me out cold. There was no immediate waking back up on the other end of the parking lot, in the back of Armin's van or on a park bench at five in the morning three hours post-fight. This time, there wasn't darkness, but a stark unconsciousness drenched in red that refused to move. A lifetime passed through me as I lived outside my mind and traveled across terrain made up of stardust and celestial vividness that put me through a vacuum. There were times when my breathing swam through running rivers of blood and my fingertips twitched beneath the fight to regain lucidness, but my body wasn't interested in pulling through right then. For the time being, I was shut down, and there was nothing I could do about it except wait within the sparking neurons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Of The Parish

  


Winter's dead air hung above my head like a warning. Every time I breathed against the weightlessness fragments of my lungs flaked away as if they were made of mica, and I saw the streetlights. They were lining a sidewalk in front of a Mexican grocery store I'd never bothered visiting, and someone must've forgotten to turn off the OPEN sign because the red neon light determinedly buzzed against snowy wind. After a long stare I blinked once, twice and then normally. It was sort of funny because for a moment I thought I'd died. What would that've said about death then? Perpetually seeing without anatomical reason? I might not have been dead, but it was evident I still hadn't made it back to my mind. In that moment I was interstellar, floating and really, who knows? Maybe I _did_ die. It sure felt like it.

Someone grabbed my ankles and then another someone shoved their hands beneath my armpits with a hard grunt. As soon as they lifted me I flipped the breaker on myself, and my brain cells bled together until they created a swamp of incongruity.

"You can't take this kid to Sancta Maria. They'll let him bleed out."

"The next hospital is a forty minute drive! He could die!"

"Then _we'll_ drive him!"

Even the people who'd beat me over the span of a week didn't want a decaying organism on their hands. That was why they hoisted me up and placed me into the backseat in Armin's van and drove through ice and snow to St. Rose hospital. Because I was unconscious, everything filtered through me during that span of minutes except for Petra grappling for my face and attempting to pat me awake when my breathing grew shallow. All I wanted to do was sleep, but she kept yelling and promising to buy me breakfast, because she was _sorry_.

Armin later told me Auruo drove us there in thirty minutes even with balding tires and sheets of ice coating the highway. The last thing I remember about that night is looking up and seeing the same person who'd kicked me into a concussion. He was helping carry me through automatic doors that gave the impression heaven was lit by fluorescent light bulbs and constructed out of bedpans. When nurses shuffled toward me—not enthused by the situation at hand—he glanced down with the same stony gaze from before only to finally say something beyond authoritarian smoke blowing.

"Eren," he said my name as my vision blurred back to black, "you'll be fine."

He was right, but I didn't know that until twenty-four hours post-splenectomy. That was when I woke up again in a hospital room with mint walls and mustard chairs better suited for a senior citizen swingers' club. The blinds were pulled open and streams of light flooded onto my legs like a downpour of oranges and lemons. In the background the television trilled out the local news—something about a bombing—but when I turned my head I realized the room wasn't shared. Someone else had been there with me. Multiple someones, actually. A cluster of seats, empty drink containers and Styrofoam cups surrounded a trashcan pulled beneath the window. I had to wonder who or what had managed to sway the hospital's visitor regulations to make _that_ happen. I couldn't imagine the negotiating being based on wholesomeness.

In movies the first thing someone does is yank out their IV—I don't know how, but they do. I didn't do that because I surprisingly have selective common sense. Instead I waited less than ten minutes before reaching up for the 'nurse assist' button. I jabbed it over and over again until an alarmed man in scrubs appeared, smiled and then made me question is professionalism by walking out before I could ask him anything.

All at once there were rubber soles smacking against the tile flooring outside my room, and I stared at the door totally horrified as the stampede grew closer. For a minute I contemplated ripping out my IV and making a break for the window, but Mikasa grasping onto the door's frame and using her weight to propel herself into the hospital room kept me from my cinematic escape. She was the human embodiment of violence.

"Mikasa," Armin was tailing her. "Mikasa, they said he'd be fine!"

She strode toward me and firmly grabbed my shoulder, stared into my eyes, and had I not been previously injured, then I knew she would've slammed my head against the bedside railing. "Does anything hurt?"

"Everything hurts."

That wasn't an exaggeration either. The very center of my marrow was soupy and swishing through my bones like an upturned water bottle. When I breathed deep there was a crick that made me shudder and need to vomit, but the real issue I had with myself was how sensitive I was to light and sound. Each glance toward the window was followed by the core of my brain icing over as if I'd bit into a Popsicle while simultaneously masturbating with dry ice.

"You'll be here for a couple more days," Armin said, jogging toward me. "Did they tell you they took out your spleen? You should see your stomach."

"I'm missing _organs_?"

Mikasa let me go and poured a cup of water before explaining. "It wasn't anything vital."

"But _still_..."

Auruo appeared in the doorway with coffee and I could hear Petra down the hall. He waved at me with a strange waggle of his fingers, and a gripping pulsation of rage bit into my senses. "I hope you didn't have an emotional attachment to it."

"Not at all." I attempted to sit up more and gagged on my dry tongue. "It was just a part of _my_ anatomy. You know, a piece of _my_ human body that doesn't grow back. A small segment of _my_ humanity that wards off infection."

He stared at me judgingly, but the same man I remembered carrying me into the hospital stepped into the doorway beside him. He gave an efficiently humbling reply while smoothing his fingers over his hipbones. It looked like he was petting himself.

"You have strange sensitivities. Are you expecting us to give it back to you now that it's biohazardous waste? If you're that suicidal, then maybe we could make a phone call and have Sancta Maria reinsert it for you. Knowing them, they'd do it for free."

" _Levi_ ," Petra said his name with a loud laugh. She made it sound as if he'd been joking when I wasn't all that sure. "How're you feeling, Eren?"

Somewhere between consciousness and the surgical procedure my friends had become buddy-buddy with the people who were responsible for my hospitalization. There was a puzzle there I couldn't solve, but it didn't seem I was in a position to loudly complain about my circumstances. My guts were coiled as if someone had slapped a steel hook into me abdominal muscles and connected it to a weighted chain. Fortunately, because of that, I couldn't react the way I desperately wanted to. Auruo would've been drained into a bowl of alphabet soup and I would've swallowed his viscera down while spelling out variations of some of my favorite four letter words had I been physically able.

Levi's white boots scuffed the tile floor as he approached my bed, and I flinched the second he lifted his hand to settle it on the back of a chair and plop down. "You know why I kicked you unconscious, don't you?"

"I deserved it?" I couldn't have confessed to my own wrong doings anymore half-heartedly. I'd seen rocks secrete more moisture than my tone. "Somewhere I was in the wrong for making a scene even though I wasn't the original instigator? Even if I came up with a valid reason you'd still find a way to make it invalid? Basically, what I'm saying here is, I don't know if I even care at this point. You guys have a lot of nerve even being here right now. I'm not thanking you all because you saved your asses from a murder trial."

The spikes on the shoulders of Levi's jacket were perfectly polished and gleaming compared to the rest of his friends', and it could've blinded someone had he moved too quickly into the sunlight. He shifted beneath the armor-like shoulders of his leather and turned toward Petra who suddenly clapped her hands together and announced she was hungry again, which meant Mikasa, Armin and everyone else had to go with her to the cafeteria. Armin shot me a look that bled out our shared uncertainty, but Mikasa was too busy giving Levi a look that implied she could eat him alive. It took Armin grabbing her wrist to wrangle her out of the room and into the hallway.

Levi continued only when everyone was gone. "You're stupider than I thought."

"How am I supposed to understand your motives when I didn't even know your name until Petra said it out loud three seconds ago?" A soft digital beeping filled the pregnant pause between us. "It's not like I can even think well right now. I haven't assessed my personal damage let alone your agenda."

His legs were smoothly crossed and his entire posture was too relaxed as he settled his elbows on the wooden chair's arms. "Do you know what happens to you when you fight people the way you fought Auruo?"

"The same thing that happens to anyone who gets _mad_ ," I said while rubbing at my pained eyes, obviously annoyed with his and my intertwined existences.  
If he was surprised, then he hid it well. "And what's that?"

As much as I didn't want to admit it, I was avoiding the question. "Isn't there some rule against stressing out inpatients? I could have you hauled off with the push of a button."

He knew better. "You need to _try_."

Reluctantly, I turned my face away from him and began to backtrack. As soon as I attempted to recollect a concise thought what came to mind was someone's sternum combusting as if shot from behind at close range. A spectrum of stringy gore sprayed across my face like warm rain and a forest of ribs burnt to cinders. I inhaled with a shudder, and my mouth ached because it was frozen into a docile smile. There was red splayed out across my vision as sudden bodies took on the shape of shadowy blobs in need of smothering. Behind me a metal fan whirled, but I couldn't stop it with my bare hands. Anytime I attempted to reach for it my fingernails were ripped off the ends of my hands and I chomped on screams. These stained ideas churned inside the central core of my skull, and all at once the beeping that'd been so quiet shook my eardrums. I couldn't breathe.

Levi was speaking, but his words circled the drain. The feeling of a human arm creeping its way from the pit of my stomach and toward the back of my teeth caused me to gag on what were actually dust motes. Without warning, I reached into the back of my mouth and there a tooth tauntingly dangled by a hair's width of a root. Though my tongue was cotton, the tooth was still slippery as I grasped onto it and broke it free from my mouth with a sandy crunch that I hardly responded to.

When it was settled in my palm I managed to reply. "I'm not sure."

Levi wasn't letting me off that easily and he watched as I placed the tooth onto the bedside table. "When I say _fight_ what's the first word that comes to mind?"

"Red…" Which was incredibly uninformative, but true enough.

Levi didn't seem impressed. Sad for him, but the only thing I could hyper focus on was how my bladder had blossomed into a flower of retribution. Whether or not Levi liked it, I was going to force myself out of bed, hobble toward the bathroom and urinate until the human species' zenith redefined itself. Only when I threw my legs over the side of the bed did it occur to me that a splenectomy required some kind of stitching, but when I waddled toward the bathroom with my IV trailing after me, I was reluctant to tug up my hospital gown and unveil the damage. If I didn't see it, then it wouldn't become real.

But it _wa_ s real. In fact, it was the kind of real that required a multitude of staples, and I clenched the IV's pole while gazing downward, disenchanted with the galaxy. Thoughts of pissing on myself as a form of canine revenge fleetingly passed between my ear canals, but I aimed and called it a day. My improvident session in the bathroom wasn't as long as I meant to make it last, and when I returned to my bed with legs better suited for a Jell-O shot, Levi was still there but focused on his phone. The screen illuminated his features, and I wasn't sure how he managed to simultaneously appear sleepy and alert.

"You're still here."  
  
"Obviously," he lowly murmured. "You're going to call me when you're healed."

"Like hell I'm calling _you_."  
  
My refusal fell on deaf ears. "You know as little as I do right now. You've made that evident, and you're a hazard to yourself and others because you understand nothing about you. Another person would suggest you seek psychological help, and in turn they'd lock you up or sedate you for the rest of your life."

He stood up, clearly not done talking, and I wasn't able to figure out a rebuttal before he continued. He dug into his jacket pocket without breaking eye contact. "Think back on your fights. When you've come to terms with how you're volcanic, then I want you to find me. If you want to control your life and utilize what you're capable of, I can help you. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before you're caught and incarcerated."

Levi produced a single piece of paper I reluctantly snatched from his fingertips. Only when he was walking toward the hospital room's door did I summon the brainpower to speak while staring at the slip he'd handed over. "Could you at least tell me what you _think_ is going on here? I'd really like a motive or _something_. You can't walk in here in all your pristine glory and projectile vomit your mystery onto me without an explanation. At least tell me what or who you are. And you know, I'm _not_ crazy either. I don't need to be in a fucking nuthouse. That was a pretty unnecessary thing to allude to."

He somewhat twisted his waist and glanced over his shoulder as he strode through the door. All I heard was the shuffling of his boots as he uttered his parting words. "I'm Levi, and I never said you're crazy, but you'll need to convince yourself of that after you decide to understand what I'm trying to get through to you."

The confrontation was enough to eat my skin clean off my muscular system, but all I could do was shake it off because he was gone. What was I supposed to do? Chase him down in my flapping hospital gown and sacrifice the final thread of my dignity? The yellow piece of ledger paper he'd handed over was tucked away in my white-knuckled fist, but all it said was Levi's name with an accompanying address located on the worst side St. Maria had to offer the community. Fate had never been particularly kind to me.

Suddenly exhausted, I leaned back only to notice that beside my bed sat a clay pot of succulents. Attached to the gift was a card, and out of curiosity, I willed myself to grab it and flip open the cardstock. There was a meager attempt at a sentence written in un-slanted cursive precisely aligned in the middle.

_I'm not sorry._

Well, that was nice.

"Eren—" Petra popped her head in only a handful of seconds after Levi had left me on the worst philosophical soul searching front imaginable. "Remember what I said in the van? We'll have breakfast together soon. Armin gave me your number. I hope you don't mind."

I raised a hand in fatigued acknowledgement. As if I could've even minded had I wanted to. "It's fine. Call me whenever. I promise I don't have much of a life."

"And I know you're probably not feeling too happy right now, but Happy Birthday. We'll make it up to you somehow, okay?" She was too nice for being a part of an ass-mauling tribe. "Do you need anything before we go for the night? I could get you something to drink other than water."

"Don't mind me sounding like an asshole," I attempted to word everything as carefully as possible, but there was no way. Not after the haziest encounter I'd ever had in my life. "But what are you guys, again? Did anyone even mention that yet?"

Petra pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and didn't hide her contemplation. With a single twitch of the corner of her lips I realized she wasn't going to tell me. "We'll talk about it over breakfast. Since Levi got to talk to you one-on-one I doubt we'll be seeing much of each other in the hospital, but rest up, okay?"

As quick as she'd come, she was gone.

Somehow I understood being left to my own devices was the equivalent to asking for a hatchet to land between my two front teeth. By being alone I was cleaving my skull as easily as one might toss a rotted pumpkin onto a sidewalk hoping for an explosion. The difference between the pumpkin and me being that pumpkin guts are potentially useful while brain matter definitely cannot grow a garden nor can it sit in an oven at three hundred and fifty degrees for thirty minutes and become a snack; cannibalism aside, of course. The point being, during my downtime in the hospital, I was the human embodiment of E. coli. As soon as the lights dimmed and there was no one left to keep me company I imagined turning my skin inside out and putting it on backwards. I'd seen less discomfort in the Dead or Alive 'You Spin Me Right Round' music video than my duration inside that hospital room.

Not only was I uncomfortable, but the hospital air was drier than a mummy's labia, which lead to me determinedly picking at my lips. Anytime I was left to fidget beneath the plastic sheets for too long I'd start eating flaked off segments of my mouth as if they were corn chips. Soon enough, I was attempting to pronounce words without splitting open thick scabs that'd accumulated over a span of twenty-four hours and avoiding orange juice. With every sip I was reminded I'd exposed my nerve endings to the elements. I couldn't stop even if I'd wanted to, though. I had to keep chewing until at one point my bottom lip fissured open and a stream of blood nestled on my chin and hardened. A nurse had to point it out to me because I was too lost in myself to even notice.

Though I wasn't sure why I was disinclined to take Levi's advice, I refused to think about what the fight with Auruo meant. I could've dwelled on the psychological recesses of my subconscious, but there was no reason to exploit myself when I had a stack of three-year-old Vogue to pilfer through and Armin's bored company.

* * *

Returning to the realm of the living happened the same day Armin decided to take me out for a proper birthday celebration. The idea of heading into a bar after sleepless nights produced a heart that was only so willing. Had it been my way, we would've gone straight home because I needed to see if I still had my job and get some kind of semblance of a decent sleep. Tugging kids up and down rock walls wasn't exactly my calling in life, but sometimes it paid my bills. Jean was technically my shift manager even though he didn't really need to work, and knowing Armin's strange concept of friendship, he'd invited him out to wherever we were going. My birthday present from Jean would be him _considering_ not firing me. I never knew what to expect from Jean, really. He was a flake.

"I have six weeks to figure out if I want to contact Levi," I grumbled while sinking into the depths of the van's maroon passenger seat. I wanted it to eat me. I wanted the fucking car to devour me whole so that I could become another crumb within its flammable polyester galaxy. But I wasn't going anywhere, and the potted cacti kept me anchored in my seat whenever I contemplated bailing in the name of road burns that would surely scrape off my already mutilated face. I'd have probably looked and felt better than I did right then. "I should lose that address sometime tonight and call Petra instead. I still want to know what they're all about. You should've asked."

"I told you I did and they wouldn't tell me. But want me to be honest?" Armin turned down the radio that'd been blaring King Harvest's Dancing In The Moonlight like a Generation X ticking time bomb. "Never mind—don't answer. I'm going to be anyway. I think you should talk to him if he believes he can help you out with your anger issues."

"Well, shit," I muttered in faux-awe. "You think I have _anger_ problems?"

"There's a lot more _knowing_ to that than _thinking_."

Armin had this air about him that made what he said typically indisputable. If he was certain, then he was right. No one had been able to one up his insight in my presence, and after knowing him since childhood, I'd long since given up attempting to combat what he had to say to me. It might've been accompanied by the snarkiest wit God had ever blown his nose onto the world with, but Armin had wisdom beyond his years. On top of it all, he was a formidable ally to have during drunken disputes. Once he joined the conversation, there was absolutely no winning out against him. He had a divine right to debate.

After stepping inside the apartment solely to shit, shower and shave, I let Armin take the reigns for the night. Any drive I could've had was numbed by fatigue, but I went with it only because Armin was spewing his guilt all over the place. We were best friends, and he was quietly blaming himself for the fight with Auruo, which had kick-started the entire fiasco. Even though I'd only had surgery three days beforehand, I couldn't let him down even if that meant lightly drinking while on prescriptions. He'd earned the right to watch me crawl under a table and possibly hook-up with the worst ex on the planet.

"Ready?" Armin grabbed his keys and didn't wait for an answer as I stepped into my pants as if they were made of acid. I'd almost worn sweats. I'd almost done the unthinkable and walked out of the front door in sweatpants before 10 PM because the staples on my abdomen were burning. I should've just told Armin I wanted to spend my birthday at Golden Corral where it would've been socially acceptable to drop a fried chicken thigh on my lap and keep going in the name of systematic obesity. "I think we're going to be early, but some people've already texted me. Don't forget a jacket."

That night's watering hole was the DIVIDER, which was where Armin had set up his congregation in the name of the holy day that was my birth. The place served burgers bubbling with greasy regret and the beer was cheap enough for my non-existent budget, but the ambiance was somewhere along the lines of Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Fresno. Since I'd turned eighteen I'd been in and out of the place as the DD, reluctantly sipping from frosted glasses of Coke while my older friends drowned themselves in their inebriation. Now I was one of them, and I was in desperate need of a younger, more naïve version of myself who wouldn't steal Armin's van when I handed him the keys.

"And look who we have here, finally. It's the belated birthday boy and Armin." Jean's voice fell on me like a Niagara Falls of bullshit and he appeared in front of us faster than the bubonic plague. Flea ridden rats continued crawling out of Jean's mouth, "I heard you were lonely and all, but come on. There was no need to tongue a garbage disposal."

Shots of not-so friendly fire were heard around the world. "I just got out of surgery."

"That's not going to make me feel anymore disinclined to tell you how ugly you look."

My lips curled into a frown. "And you look perfectly straight tonight."

"Said no one ever," Armin piped up and proceeded to high-five himself. "Y'ouch!"

Jean had approached me solely to insult me as soon as I walked through the door. As in, he'd been watching the door like a real miracle worker in hopes of finding that single opportunity to get to me before anyone else, because that's what ex-boyfriends are good for. Yes, Jean Kirschstein was my ex-boyfriend and the reason I knew firsthand what a burning sensation while urinating meant. He was the human embodiment of a relationship built on inflated egos, sex of the mediocre kind and freshman enlightenment. Somehow, we'd attempted to shake on the decision to continue our relationship on a platonic front, but someone was bitter. Actually, we were both impressively bitter, but for entirely different reasons. He because I'd never returned 50% of the designer clothing he'd left in my room, and me because of that whole gonorrhea situation we avoided mentioning since it was equally humiliating. That said, everyone knew.

"Now that I've seen your face," I began as I strode past him and recognized several people in passing. "I could use my first legal drink and then probably a lobotomy."

Armin was trailing behind me, and I wondered if he ever thought about _why_ he included Jean in on everything. It wasn't as if he wanted to be friends with us. We were those people he called when he was bored. He'd flat out told us that to our faces, but I was the only one loudly offended. Jean wasn't even remotely cool either. The guy grew up playing polo and wearing Ralph Lauren. Not to mention he was the male equivalent to the horse girl from everyone's high school class except his flower bordered horse posters were framed oil paintings and his enthusiasm worth more than my college tuition plus my estimated graduate tuition. I was embarrassed to know we'd dated at one point under the guise of being best friends to his financially entitled family. Best friends who gagged on each other, but in hindsight that really was just a minor detail and an eventual sore throat.

The bar was filtering out our friend group one by one, but Armin wouldn't let me have my first drink only because Connie made him swear to wait until he showed up with his high school sweetheart and martial arts combatant Sasha. Half the time I couldn't tell they were dating because they were too busy rubbing their faces into carpet seeing who could give whom the bigger rug burn. Armin steered me away from the bar, and I sat down to drink my final frosted glass of Coke.

"Did you hear about that?" Armin was referring to the local news channel on the television that hung over the bar. I squinted and attempted to read the captions. "This is the second local bombing. It was another pharmacy, but there's no connection between the two. The owners weren't even acquainted."

"Jesus Christ—why _here_ , though?"

Armin shook his head and swished his lips over to the side. A frown quickly snuggled up with corners of his mouth. "That's what I've been trying to figure out. It could be some anti-drug organization gone radical. You know the pill problem here is outrageous."

That wasn't a good enough reason for me. "People still _need_ those prescriptions, though. How is that doing anyone more harm than good?"

"Humanity isn't always humane when it comes to their personal plights. We've all done selfish things in the expense of others. That's human nature. If we're willing to eat each other in the name of living during starvation, then what are a few prescriptions to someone with the right motive? I'm not being an apologist, but that's just human capability."

Armin was getting sort of Nostradamus and we hadn't even started drinking yet. Thankfully, Connie strode through the front door holding what looked to be a pie with Sasha padding alongside him, and he made a point to shove Jean out of the way before they could even begrudgingly say 'hello.' Connie was more my friend than Jean's much like Sasha and Marco—who was nowhere to be seen, currently—were more Jean's friends than mine. We kept everything neutral when grouped together, though. The diarrhea spewing only happened behind closed doors when our most melodramatic tangents could be veiled from our assumed enemies aka very best friends.

"Eren," Sasha was being too intense about seeing me. Her crazed, breathlessness was more than I needed right then. "How're you feeling? We brought you birthday pie, and I bought you a Get Well card. Don't let Connie's signature sway you. He had absolutely nothing to do with that card. He really doesn't care about you."

"Seriously, Sasha?" He plopped the strawberry pie down in front of me and the twenty-one candles flopped down immediately after. I'd have been lying had I said I wasn't somewhat touched by how they'd remembered I hated icing. It set off my gag reflexes. Before I could say thanks, Connie suddenly snapped his stare down at me. "I told her the card was fucking hideous. I tried to tell her it was the ugliest card Hallmark had to offer. The only thing that could've made it worse was a Bible verse about how God touches all of us. What kind of Freudian implication would've been there, huh? Sasha, the card is so ugly."

"I'm sorry, Connie, did you say something?" Sasha brushed him aside and Armin coughed through a snort in front of me. She snapped out her arms and handed over the lavender envelope. I carefully grabbed it and took my time opening it. "But are you okay? Oh, and Happy Birthday. Everyone was already wondering why you didn't let us throw you a party, but I guess that doesn't matter now, huh? Connie said your phone was shut off for like a week."

My jaw ached from how I was trying not to laugh at them, but I managed to talk evenly enough to sound sort of polite. She was legitimately concerned. I didn't blame her, though. I looked like shit. "I'm better off than I could be, yeah. Hey, thanks, Sasha…"

As I waved the card at her I ended up flashing Connie a short look so that he knew I also included him. It actually _was_ the ugliest card I'd ever seen. A thoughtful sunset and doves flying across 1998 graphic design might've been inspiring to someone on their deathbed, but the metallic gold script font was sort of condescending considering how sprightly I _wasn't_ feeling. There were funeral itineraries with more pizazz.

Connie instructed a total stranger to guard the birthday pie before tugging me up by my bicep and motioning for everyone to follow us toward the bar. Even though everything had been turned upside down throughout the past few days I was suddenly at ease with the people who mattered to me the most. No one asked about what had happened to land me in the hospital, and somewhere in the pit of my torn up guts I figured they knew anyway. They weren't holding whatever was ailing me against who I was, as always, and Armin had been forgiven for more than likely reminding them not to bother me about it, again.

"Here's to twenty-one years!" Connie handed me my first shot of Fireball Whisky as he tugged my ex-boyfriend close to him, being uncharacteristically friendly. "And I we should all thank Jean for being the designated driver!"

By the way Jean was staring at Connie I could tell he hadn't even known that, but before he could retract Connie's statement, I tipped back the shot in one go and handed off the plastic cup to Jean. "Yeah, thanks, Jean."


End file.
